Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/339

Rh excess of these satisfactions over the concomitant pain and suffering. The contrary assumption, he has shown, would result in a reductio ad absurdum so complete as to be logically unthinkable. The "pains innumerable and immeasurably great," which Prof. Huxley finds to be the accompaniment of the highest functional development of the sentient organism, are, on the whole, counterbalanced by pleasures still more immeasurable and complete.

Indeed, the "ape and tiger" surviving in human dispositions, the pains and griefs, the miseries and crimes, which are a part of the experience of civilized man, constituting his inheritance from a myriad generations of brute ancestors, are the sine qua non of all morality and all ethical progress. They furnish the pou sto of ethics, the underlying conditions without which there could be no such thing as a moral being. There can be no light without a concomitant shadow; all we can rationally ask is that the light shall furnish the medium for seeing the picture of life as it is. Without the shadows, no beauty of landscape or human countenance; without the darker shadows of suffering and sin, no moral beauty—no ethical advancement.

Prof. Huxley well says that "ape and tiger methods are not reconcilable with the ethical principle." This is certainly true of beings possessing a developed moral consciousness; but nothing is surer, from the evolutionist's standpoint, than that the sense of moral obligation was sired by these very "ape and tiger methods" as they have prevailed among the lower orders of sentient beings. The sense of obligation is primarily purely egoistic. The "ought" of primitive man was not a moral obligation; it was a recognition of something owed to himself. That impulse to self-preservation which is proverbially the first law of Nature, out of consciousness of obligation to self, developed, through experience, the application of this sense of obligation to that larger self, the family; through gregarious association to the still growing self, the herd or tribe; and again on to the state, the nation, and in the consciousness of a few—the perfect flower and fruitage of cosmic evolution to man as man, to all forms of sentient life, to the earth itself as the teeming mother of the human race.

The sense of duty, as we now understand it, was not developed until the remote and indirect motive of race-maintenance and altruistic service was consciously and voluntarily substituted for the primary, egoistic motive of self-preservation. Yet, as I have elsewhere shown, "here has been no new creation, but merely a process of transformation, of evolution. The 'raw material' of morality is found in the simplest orderly manifestations of volitional activities in organic Nature; yes, back even in those steadfast laws and tendencies which are manifest in the action of the inorganic universe. . . In the last analysis, it is not two things